Penn Central

Dear readers, it’s good to be back in town. It was, as you know, an odd week. Up at Lake George, the earth moved, too—sitting on chaises longues, my wife and I felt the pair of lateral rumblings a few seconds apart; I vividly remembered the temblor that shook the city on October 19, 1985, so when some people on the next chairs said, “What was that?,” I answered, “An earthquake.” They laughed, and I told them I wasn’t kidding; then, a minute or two later, my older daughter came charging over, Blackberry in hand, to announce that it said on Twitter that there had been an earthquake. Cut to Saturday morning, when we dropped her off at college in the frozen north and, instead of spending the day with her, hastened back to town (a five-hour drive), reaching the city via eerily quiet roads (a cafe table set up in a lane of the George Washington Bridge would have gone undisturbed) and finding the Upper East Side strangely festive, like a Mardi Gras before a period of deprivation. But we sat up late and woke up early, and seeing the images of devastation and hearing the news of real peril elsewhere gives rise to gratitude, expressed to metaphorical higher powers, for the luck of the draw this time and to worry and best wishes for those who are bearing the brunt of the storm.

Meanwhile, strange events of other sorts were occurring in the cybersphere; I had a spotty Internet connection and couldn’t follow the discussions closely, but I was truly surprised to see the dustup of cinematic controversy aroused by a little post I did two Sundays ago. That morning, preparing for our trip, I spent a few minutes reading the French news and caught an interesting new interview with Sean Penn in Le Figaro, in which he expressed some dismay about the way that “The Tree of Life” came out and some bewilderment about how Terrence Malick directed him in it. I’ve long been curious about the relations of directors and actors, and, in particular, the way that the sense of a performance differs on different sides of the camera, and I found it noteworthy that Penn, who is very good in the movie (albeit in a small role), felt himself to have been inadequately engaged in the creative process by the director. That was pretty much it; much to my surprise, this little anecdote got picked up by other journalists and elicited, from you, thirty comments, and many of an unusual level of passion.

Soon after the film’s release, David Denby posted here about the debates about the film that raged in social settings, and it continues to arouse strong and widely divergent responses, among readers and journalists alike. To some extent, the discussion was sparked by Penn’s momentary departure from the norms of celebrity; Michael Kinsley famously wrote, “A gaffe is when a politician tells the truth,” and the cinematic correlate is that a gaffe is when a Hollywood player speaks sincerely and on the record. Penn’s candor is admirable; he clearly recognized the sharpness of his plain speaking, and he quickly hedged his remarks, adding that he “recommends” the film, “provided that you go without preconceptions. Everyone has to find their own personal, emotional, or spiritual connection. Those who manage to do so usually come out very touched.”

There were lots of useful contributions to discussion, as from reader Nicosian, who recalled:

Malick let Penn do his actorly thing in The Thin Red Line in a couple scenes in which his character gruffly lectures Jim Caviezel, and they stick out like sore thumbs by their conventionality. Clearly, Malick learned his lesson.

And, at the L.A. Times, Steven Zeitchik linked to his interview with the film’s cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki, to bring out the particulars of Malick’s way of filming and the way the actors coped with them. Battle lines were organized, of course, according to whether one liked or disliked the film, But there were also remarks of a peculiar vituperation and hostility to Malick, symbolizing a struggle between two straw people: the director, with his cavalier and cosmic artistic autarky, and the actor, with his quest for immediate emotional connection on a human scale. The actor, in this dichotomy, represents the business side of the business, the power of the medium to tug the heartstrings of a vast audience and, in the process, sell lots of tickets; the director plays the role of the financially irresponsible elitist whose presumptions to self-expression—investors and audience be damned—threaten the industry with his sense of the medium (and its money) as his plaything and spectators as either children who should sit still for their lesson or recalcitrant philistines.

Of course, it’s an exaggeration on all counts. Even if Penn is wrong in his assessment of “The Tree of Life,” his remarks are sincere and thoughtful; and it’s no surprise that Malick, whose film deals in ultimate mysteries, should both have wanted the film to reverberate with the power of character of such actors as Penn, Brad Pitt, Jessica Chastain, and the young performers and yet would let the power of his vision override his actor’s desire for explanation. In Nathaniel Penn’s superb oral history, at the GQ Web site, of the making of “Badlands,” Malick’s first film, here’s what Alan Vint, one of the film’s actors, said:

When we catch Kit, after we put on the handcuffs, we had this long walk back to the car. Terry [Malick] comes up and he goes, “I want you to do this,” and he lifts one leg up and hops like a frog. I thought he was kidding. But he wasn’t. I said, “Forgive me, Terry, but what is that?” He said, “Just trust me.” I said, “I don’t know what that is. I mean, it’s an expression of what?” He said, “I don’t know how to put it in words, but just do that.” I said, “I can’t do that. I don’t know what it is. Terry, you gotta help me out here!” We went around like this for half an hour, and he couldn’t explain it. Finally Martin [Sheen] comes over and says, “Alan, I went through this, exactly, but this is the best director I’ve ever worked with, and I’ve learned to trust him.” I said, “Then you know exactly where I am with this.” He smiled and said, “You guys work it out.”

The quest for meaning and for meanings are two very different things. The experience of movie-going, like the artist’s experience, often belongs to the ineffable, whereas the process of movie-making, like the process of criticism, requires words. There, criticism becomes a variety of literature, in its conjuring of what defies description; and there, the making of art enters the moral realms of love and war, where the physical imperative in the heat of the moment requires paradoxical intensities of control and abandon, of trust and danger. The actor, whose person is onscreen, is entitled to his fear and is within reason when seeking measures to build his confidence as he approaches the tightrope; and, being onscreen, his agonies and struggles are apparent and worthy of the sympathy they elicit. But the director, if he’s any good, struggles and agonizes equally, and, if criticism has served any purpose in the last sixty years, it’s to bring the director’s presence out from around the edge of the screen and make it as palpable and as vital as the actor’s—and to make clear his emotional and moral burden in creating a world on screen, and his potentially vast, even comprehensive, achievement in doing so. Of recent films, few even merit discussion in such grand terms as does “The Tree of Life.”

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